


Remember me for Centuries

by GraceEliz



Series: The Eldritch Collection [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Ghost Stories, Ghosts, Worldbuilding, blame discord, entirely detail neutral, heavy war references, the Clones as spirits unable to move on, the Reader as the extremely frightened one who is remembering, the Twins as deities of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28243923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz
Summary: Neither of them move and you should be afraid; you feel their ice, the coldcoldcold that always walks behind them. Grief wells in your chest and just as you were taught you push it down.It is not your grief.
Series: The Eldritch Collection [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1992514
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28
Collections: New SW Canon Server Works





	Remember me for Centuries

**Author's Note:**

> bc Centuries is on my CG playlist and someone brought up this concept for the twins and I spooked myself out too much to write more

Coruscant is a world of Ghosts, they all say, and all foreigners laugh and scoff because that’s just a tourist joke, but it is. White ones soaked in red, all human. Some of them are blue, striped or splattered in it, and they all look the same. They stalk the streets in squads, the red ones, patrol-routes of the ancient Wars. The blue ones guard the Temple; the Jedi there treat them as living beings, but they don’t respond. They flicker through beings and buildings and march through the air where there used to be the sky-bridges.

The only way to get a response from a Ghost is to find its name, or so the Elders told you when you were a baby, and that’s impossible isn’t it? They’re but presences, remnants, extant only by remembrance of the City of the Great Purge that almost destroyed the galaxy. Ghosts can’t interact with living beings, they’re shades, not even glowing-blue like the Jedi-Ghosts who do interact, who use the Force to flit across the galaxy. No, you’ve always been assured, they’re gone.

 _You will remember,_ comes a voice.

“Who are you?”

Out of your wall steps a Ghost. He is red, and the one behind him is blue. _We are the remaining_ , he tells you, _and you can see us. Do you remember?_

“What? Do I remember what? I am a child of Coruscant, I’ve been seeing Ghosts since I was old enough to walk,” you say, pressing into your wall with the quilt held against your chest. Neither of them move and you should be afraid; you feel their ice, the coldcoldcold that always walks behind them. Grief wells in your chest and just as you were taught you push it down.

It is not your grief.

_The Wars._

You want to scream and cry in your terror. “The Wars were centuries ago, the Purge was centuries ago!”

The blue one flits past you and through the wall into the outside. The red one sits by your bed. _You will remember us,_ he says with the same voice they all have, and you shiver.

You wake up wondering where you are in terror, hearing the shots, hearing the fear and feeling the pain and everything inside you is emptiness. A sob builds up inside you, scared and hurt, but before it breaks out of you the red Ghost is here, again.

_Do you remember now?_

“Commander,” you say, knowing it deep in your soul. “Commander.”

You do not remember. Not yet, nothing beyond knowing this one is Commander, but the Ghosts – they move, now. The blue one waves a hand through your arm; a handful of red ones track you on your walk to work and the fear swells like a dust-cloud and when you look at the Temple you see for a moment, superimposed, black clouds of smoke, and the smell in your nose is of ashes.

Walking home, you see marching troops on the main boulevards and the iconic shapes of the ancient warships in the sky, as if you’re in some holodrama of that great period of upheaval. How long has it been? Three hundred years.

There is a red Ghost outside your home, and people are looking at you and your escort and the tears and shuddering breaths cannot be stopped. What is happening to you? Who are they?

That night you don’t sleep.

When you wake, in time for work, you’ve slept an hour, and in your head you hear your own voice begging. In the corner is the Commander.

_You remember._

“No.”

_Yes you do, child._

But you do not want to and you run away from the understanding. When a box falls to the floor, you dive under the table chanting, and when your eyes open there are Ghosts. Ghosts, ringing the room crouched, their white glowing and the red misty like bloodspray, and terror on the faces of everyone around you.

 _Remember,_ says one with a smouldering hole in his chest, and then they all vanish.

The red Ghost is waiting for you when you get home, shaken still, sat on your bed leaning his arms on his knees. His head tips up at you. _Do you remember, now?_ It is the tenderest voice you have ever heard.

With a scream, you hurl your glass at him but it fades through as you knew it would, bouncing off your wall to roll off your bed through his leg to the floor where it stays, still and solid and normal. “Why did the Twins not guide you onwards,” you demand, desperate, blastershot in your ears, still, unending, the screaming loss and endless endless marching tramp-tramp-tramp across your every thought.

The Ghost laughs. You have never heard one laugh. _They brought us our death, for certain,_ he spits and the tears fall down your face like rain _, they brought us our death and now we are trapped._

“I don’t understand!”

_Don’t you hear it, child? What we had to do because of one man’s fear for his children? Fear of loss._

Once upon a time there was a man so afraid of the loss of those he loved that he doomed everything he’d ever known. Once upon a time he killed his family with his own two hands and the Force cried and for his crime he was destined to never rest.

Once upon a time there was a man so obsessed by immortality he began to scheme and in his greed destroyed everything he’d ever worked for.

Once upon a time, the Twins did not guide the dead to rest.

Your tears taste like soot.

_Remember._


End file.
